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SOEPpapers 1236 / 2026
Using long running panel data spanning at least 15 years from Australia, Germany and the UK, this study investigates longitudinal age–wellbeing trajectories by the Big Five personality traits. We estimate within person (fixed effects) models separately for each country and for low/high trait subgroups, producing 30 distinct trajectories. Across all subgroups, we found the same ageing pattern: a decline ...
2026| Alan Piper, Min Zou, Ying Zhou
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SOEPpapers 1235 / 2025
The empirical literature on the relationship between age and well-being is characterised by an unusually persistent series of disagreements over data, method, and interpretation. Previous attempts to advance the discussion have involved different scholars’ specific prescriptions, which were often in near total contradiction to other scholars’ attempts to do the same. Instead, we use specification curve ...
2025| Kausik Chaudhuri, Alan Piper
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SOEPpapers 1234 / 2025
Analyses of income distributions across households crucially depend on equivalence scales. They define income increments necessary to keep a household’s living standard constant as it is joined by additional adults or children. Such scales have frequently been estimated using income satisfaction data, yet under the assumption that household income, size, and structure are exogenous. The present paper ...
2025| Melanie Borah, Susanne Elsas
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SOEPpapers 1233 / 2025
This exploratory study examines the effects of parental socialization and parental role models at ages 7 to 10 on the entrepreneurial intentions of their children in adolescence. Analysis of German household data and more than 1,400 observations shows a moderation effect between parental role models and socialization. An adolescent’s willingness to become self-employed in the future is influenced by ...
2025| Stefan Schneck
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SOEPpapers 1232 / 2025
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed significant weaknesses in Germany’s ability to generate timely, equity-sensitive evidence at the household level. While national surveillance systems produced daily counts of confirmed cases, hospitalisations, and deaths, they offered little insight into the social and economic conditions shaping the spread and impact of the virus. Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), ...
2025| Alexander Lepe, Ingo Kolodziej, Sabine Zinn
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SOEPpapers 1231 / 2025
Background: The co-occurrence of many refugees arriving in Germany in 2015 and 2016 and the increase in anti-refugee attitudes among Germans suggests an association. High levels of public concern about immigration, now again in 2025, emphasize the importance of identifying predictors of attitudes towards refugees in general. Aims: The objective is to test whether high regional shares of refugees (share ...
2025| Alyna Paul
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SOEPpapers 1230 / 2025
Machine learning is increasingly used in social science research, especially for prediction. However, the results are sometimes not as straight-forward to interpret compared to classic regression models. In this paper, we address this trade-off by comparing the predictive performance of random forests and logit regressions to analyze labor market vulnerabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a ...
2025| Daniel Graeber, Lorenz Meister, Carsten Schröder, Sabine Zinn
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SOEPpapers 1229 / 2025
Lauded psychotherapist and narcissism expert Otto Kernberg claimed that midlife crises were almost solely a narcissistic phenomenon. This article, in part, takes this claim as inspiration and investigates the relationship between grandiose narcissism and wellbeing. Importantly, and following previous research, this work considers grandiose narcissism in two distinct ways: an agentic admiration aspect ...
2025| Alan Piper
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SOEPpapers 1228 / 2025
Despite extensive literature on incentives to increase employees’ work performance, economic research on employer-provided non-monetary benefits remains rare. This study investigates the relationship between benefits and employees’ work effort utilizing data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The analysis is based on data from eleven survey waves from 2006 to 2022 and considers five benefit types: ...
2025| Helena Manger
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SOEPpapers 1227 / 2025
This paper estimates and analyzes the distribution and composition of pre-tax national income in Germany since reunification, combining personal income tax returns, household survey data, and national accounts. We find that pre-tax national income inequality has increased since the 1990s, though to a lesser extent than suggested by previous studies. Our results draw parallels in top income structure ...
2025| Stefan Bach, Charlotte Bartels, Theresa Neef
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SOEPpapers 1226 / 2025
While the body of literature on the non-take-up of public aid has grown substantially in recent years, a notable gap remains in the literature of non-take-up rates for student aid programs, where research is still extremely limited. This paper examines the non-take-up rate of Germany’s federal student aid program BAföG by creating a microsimulation based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel ...
2025| Alexander Eriksson Byström, María Sól Antonsdóttir
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SOEPpapers 1225 / 2025
How does the arrival of a new immigrant group affect earlier generations of immigrants? Do group relations and self-identification change? Previous research on ethnic boundaries is usually restricted to a two-group paradigm and primarily focuses on the majority group’s perspective. In contrast, this study analyzes how the arrival of refugees in Germany influenced previous immigrants of Turkish and ...
2025| Renate Lorenz
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SOEPpapers 1224 / 2025
This paper employs a panel event study design to examine the causal effects of the 2013 flood disaster in East Germany on subjective well-being. We merge geo-spatial flood data with longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to identify individuals in affected municipalities. Our results show that those affected by the flood report a significant life satisfaction drop of 0.17 points ...
2025| Sachintha Fernando, Katharina Kolb, Christoph Wunder
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SOEPpapers 1223 / 2025
In this study, we contribute to the literature about the effects of improving access to citizenship on integration outcomes. Hereby, we exploit exogenous variation from two citizenship reforms in Germany to estimate the effects of residency requirements on perceived discrimination, which is strongly linked to individual well-being, sense of belonging, and migration desires and decisions. We find that ...
2025| Adriana Rocío Cardozo Silva, Christopher Prömel
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SOEPpapers 1222 / 2025
We investigate social disparities in digital skills, focusing on both actual proficiency levels and confidence in these skills. Drawing on a representative sample from Germany, we first demonstrate that both dimensions strongly predict labor market success. We then use this sample to identify gender and socioeconomic disparities in levels and confidence. Finally, using a long-run RCT panel framework ...
2025| Fabian Kosse, Tim Leffler, Arna Woemmel
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SOEPpapers 1221 / 2025
How do students’ earnings expectations differ by being the first in their family to attend university (FiF) and how do they affect field of study choice? We leverage unique survey and administrative data to document sizable gaps in expected earnings between FiF and non-FiF students. Our data can explain two-thirds of this gap, with the largest share attributable to field of study choice. We show that ...
2025| Katharina Adler, Fabian Kosse, Markus Nagler, Johannes Rincke
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SOEPpapers 1220 / 2025
The transition to parenthood is a critical period that exacerbates gendered economic inequality, with mothers more likely than their partners to experience employment disruptions and income losses. This study examines individual poverty risk among partnered indivduals (N=1,237) in Germany from a life course perspective, analyzing how gendered career patterns around first births between 1992 and 2013 ...
2025| Christina Siegert
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SOEPpapers 1219 / 2025
This study investigates the impact of child-related absence from work on the income of working mothers and fathers, addressing a significant research gap in sociology and labour economics. While previous research has established that gender and parenthood significantly influence income levels, the consequences of caring for a sick child—a common and unpredictable responsibility—remain inadequately ...
2025| Ayhan Adams, Katrin Golsch
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SOEPpapers 1218 / 2025
Mit den Daten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP) 2016 ist erstmalig und einmalig eine Überprüfung der Vergleichbarkeit der ein- und zweistufigen Messmethode des Effort-Reward-Imbalance Modells im Sozio-oekonomischen Panel möglich. Methodik: Die Reliabilität wird mit deskriptiven Statistiken, Inter-Item-Korrelation und Item-Skala Statistiken überprüft. Die Konstrukt- und Kriteriumsvalidität wird ...
2025| Mandy Müller
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SOEPpapers 1217 / 2025
Men at the bottom quintile of the German male earnings distribution had lower average earnings in 2019 than in 2001. In contrast, female earnings have increased throughout the distribution. What explains these diverging trends and how did they translate into changes in net income? Data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) reveal that the drop in bottom male earnings is mostly due to a decrease in work ...
2025| Eliana Coschignano, Robin Jessen